مطالب

Teaching practices are believed to be a determining factor in educational systems. For over two decades, the Ministry of Education (MOE) in Iran has been organizing Top Model Teaching Festivals to address the changes required to promote English teachers' professional development. Considering the high amounts of investment in such programs and their impacts on teaching and sustainable learning, this study probed into how the award-winning teachers critically view and evaluate the efficacy of such nationwide festivals. To this end, ten award-winning EFL teachers in the festivals were interviewed using a semi-structured interview protocol to qualitatively elicit their attitudes towards the program. The results obtained from the content analysis of the interview transcripts revealed that such festivals have not adequately fulfilled their main objective, which is to improve the teaching quality and potential of teachers and promote their professional development. Thus, the study calls for a reassessment of the effectiveness of such programs to find alternative ways for empowering teachers.       

Emotional words are assumed to have a processing advantage over neutral words due to their emotional content. Meanwhile, this advantage depends on other word features such as frequency and the characteristics of the processor and context of learning. Accordingly, the current study investigated the simultaneous impacts of L2 words’ emotional valence and frequency, and L2 user’s gender on word recognition time in a natural reading context. 43 intermediate EFL learners read 36 sentences in a coherent text for comprehension while their eye movements were recorded by eye-tracker. The findings revealed that participants processed the positive, negative, and neutral words identically based on eye fixation time. However, the frequency effect was attained for both valenced and neutral words. Also, no significant gender differences were approved in terms of recognition time though male participants tended to process all word types slightly faster than female ones. The lack of processing difference between valenced and neutral words is attributed to the disembodiment of L2 emotional words and learning experience of the participants as late EFL learners. These learners have been deprived of affective socialization and the affective sensory experience in their development of L2 emotional words. The absence of valence/frequency interaction is attributed to the L1/L2 relationship in terms of the target words. Although witnessed gender effect did not reach a significance level, it is suggested that the processing of emotional words be viewed in a multidimensional framework where the characteristics of the word, the processor, and the learning context are taken into account

This small-scale corpus-based study delineates the most common and significant dialectal variations between the two most commonly spoken English varieties: American English (AmE) and British English (BrE). As a result of the corpus analysis, four main areas have emerged as to where dialectal variations take place: pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, and orthography/punctuation. A total of 26 variations ( f =10 in pronunciation, f =5 in vocabulary, f =6 grammar, and f =5 in orthography/punctuation) was identified by analyzing a variety of sources, including books, articles, online dictionaries, and websites. The significance of the variations in the abovementioned language areas and their implications for language teaching were discussed empirically and pedagogically. Notwithstanding the limitations, the research is expected to contribute to our understanding and awareness of the dialectal variations and assist language learners and teachers with the learning and teaching of these variations pedagogically and systematically since it might serve as a guide or a framework of reference.

There is dearth of research on disclosing the ethos of Appreciative Inquiry (AI)-based pedagogy application in language education settings (Johnson, 2014), especially amid the Covid-19 pandemic era. To disclose the ethos in AI-based pedagogy as an appropriate pandemic pedagogy, the present study attempts to uncover the Iranian EFL learners' narratives on their lived experiences of a pedagogical shift in an English language school in northern Iran when dealing with an online class during the pandemic. Embedded in 4-D ethos of AI-based pedagogy, namely Discovery, Dream, Design, and Destiny, this study utilizes data from observational field notes and interviews in shaping narratives. It was shown that the online language lesson agenda is a dynamic resource that emerges from content development and can be planned to confirm the learner's knowledge. More creative ways of learners' assessment are also yearned for to neutralize cheating possibilities. In addition, new modes of meaning in language education are envisaged to be designed. Learners position themselves as enriched multimodal text repertoires in a dynamic not static language community of practice. The c urrent study has some implications for online language practice, especially in periods of crisis such as a pandemic.

La langue persane fait partie des langues dont le groupe consonantique finale de la syllabe CVCC est soumise à certaines contraintes du point de vue de la succession des sons. Le présent article se fixe, comme objectif, d’étudier les emprunts lexicaux qui, dans les groupes consonantiques en position finale, comprennent une consonne labiale non appartenant au persan contemporain mais qui y ont trouvé leur place. Pour ce faire, toutes les syllabes en CVCC ayant une consonne labiale en position de C 1 ou C 2 seront étudiées. Elles seront ensuite comparées en fonction de leur statut (lexique pur ou empreint) dans la langue. Seront ainsi étudiés la fréquence d’occurrence de chaque consonne, tous les ordres possibles de leur apparition ainsi que l’ordre de leur succession. Cette recherche s’inscrit dans le cadre des recherches descriptives et analytiques basées sur des données statistiques. Le dictionnaire Mochiri comprenant 40.000 entrées, a été utilisé comme source principale pour l’extraction des données de cette recherche. L’article est présenté dans le cadre théorique des principes de phonématique et du principe de l’ordre (de la succession) des phonèmes en fonction de leur degré de sonorité. Les résultats de cette recherche montrent que le lexique purement persan a un comportement totalement différent du lexique emprunté en ce qui concerne le type de succession dans le groupe consonantique, l’ordre de la succession sonnante et la sélection du noyau de la syllabe. En persan pur, la consonne /f/ en tant que premier élément constitutif du groupe consonantique et la consonne /m/ en tant que deuxième membre de ce groupe, sont les plus fréquemment employées, parmi les consonnes labiales.